Worlds Elsewhere (76 page)

In accordance with the terms of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, British rule had ended on the stroke of midnight on 1 July 1997, when Hong Kong had exchanged one set of imperial masters for another. Shakespeare, as so often, had stayed.

Housed in splendidly brutalist headquarters on the island's north shore front, with a billion-Hong-Kong-dollar view across to Kowloon, the location of the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts bespeaks its significance. Founded in 1984, the APA runs courses in drama, dance, music and Cantonese opera from undergraduate up to master's level, and supplies a stream of graduates to the huge Hong Kong film and television industry.

I was interested in the APA because, celebrating its 30th anniversary and Shakespeare's 450th, the academy had elected to put on a show that, to my surprise, had popped up several times in my peregrinations across China:
The Taming of the Shrew.
This production couldn't
have been more different from the slimmed-down version I'd seen back in Beijing; in the best traditions of intercultural dialogue it was being staged as a melange of Cantonese opera, traditional dance and postmodern western-style drama. There were 150 people in the cast. From the reports, it sounded both brilliant and bizarre.

I'd emailed Ceri Sherlock, its director and the dean of drama. I was in luck; though the run was over, workshops were continuing, with a view to giving the show a future life. I'd be welcome to come along, if I didn't mind singing for my supper – the students could do with some feedback, and they'd love it from a British critic.

Wasn't the show in Cantonese? ‘Come along anyway,' he said.

Waiting in the APA's huge, concrete foyer, expecting ‘Ceri' to be a Cantonese name, I was disconcerted to find myself shaking hands with a smiling, apple-cheeked Welshman. Sherlock was one of Hong Kong's many thousands of expats. After a career in Welsh theatre, opera and television, he had first visited as part of a judging committee. A job had come up. He'd stayed for a year, which had become two, then three, then four …

As we walked towards the rehearsal room, Sherlock explained that this was a boom time for Chinese drama. After the handover, there had been an explosion of interest in Cantonese culture. New plays had revisited ancient Chinese texts, or drawn on stories from Hong Kong's own history. After decades in the shadow of Britain, the island was belatedly discovering its Chinese side – both similar to, and crucially distinct from, the over-mighty mainland.

So why do Shakespeare? Why not something Chinese?

A smile flickered across his lips. ‘Ah, but this is
Chinese
Shakespeare. Much more exciting.'

As we took our seats in a pocket-sized studio, he explained how the production had come about. The APA had been searching for a graduation piece that could showcase students from all of its schools, and
The Taming of the Shrew
had come up – not so much for its gender politics, the obvious talking point in the west, but for the fact that it was technically a play-within-a-play.

Though the framework is usually abandoned by modern directors, the text of
The Taming of the Shrew
begins with an ‘Induction' in which a drunken tinker, Christopher Sly, falls asleep and is discovered by an aristocrat, who persuades Sly when he awakes that he is in fact a wealthy ‘lord' for whom an entertainment is to be performed (the episode closely
resembles a tale in
The Arabian Nights
). The storyline usually regarded as the play proper, the lopsided affair between Katherine and Petruccio, is in fact a self-enclosed drama played out by a cast of actors for the benefit of Sly and a watching onstage audience. It is one of Shakespeare's earliest experiments in metadrama – a lingering fascination that also produced Bottom and co.'s horny-handed attempt at ‘Pyramus and Thisbe' in
A Midsummer Night's Dream
and the play-within-the-play in
Hamlet.

Sherlock had seen it as something more practical, a way of uniting the talents of his various students with their different but complementary disciplines. The Induction could be a Chinese opera, with drama students trained in modern-dress naturalism acting out the play-within-the-play, the war between Katherine and Petruccio. Shakespeare might have approved: like all the best dramatic decisions, it was both hard-headed and conceptually smart.

‘The gender politics come as a bonus,' Sherlock whispered as the actors took their places.

After too many days on planes and in seminar rooms, it was a treat to be in the middle of some live drama. The students acted as if their lives depended on it. Though not in full costume, the boys wore angular suit jackets and trilbies that gave them the look of 1950s Triads in training. The girls were in vampish high heels; Katherine wore leggings, with her goodie-two-shoes sister Bianca in a frilly A-line skirt. The pace was fast and dangerous, and the relationship between the sexes utterly believable – the men growling and hissing like tomcats, the women skittish and playful, fragile yet assertive. The Cantonese was beyond me, but it seemed a fine fit, earthy and demotic. Listening to a blistering rant from Katherine, I asked Sherlock's student assistant if the translation was much different from the English script I had in front of me. He flushed pink. ‘Cantonese can be very rude.'

The day before, I'd met the Cantonese translator, Rupert Chan. The point he'd emphasised was that – far more than Mandarin – Hong Kong Cantonese was a living, evolving language, continually in flux. It borrowed shamelessly from all across Asia, and was stuffed with loan words from English and elsewhere. In its assimilative urges and hunger for novelty, it reflected Hong Kong itself.

Perhaps it was a few days' wandering amid grandiose corporate headquarters and skyscrapers, but it hit me how much
The Taming of the Shrew
is about money as well as sex: Petruccio bragging about how he can make his fortune by bedding a woman with a rich father; the
imbalanced marriage market that sees the pliant and saleable Bianca fending off suitors while the strong-willed Katherine is left with none.

After they'd run through the first act, the students took a break. For twenty minutes, in a mixture of Cantonese and English, we talked about patriarchy and relationships in contemporary China, particularly the pressure for women to conform. The subject had been on my mind since Beijing; I was pleased that at last I had someone to ask.

‘This is a big problem in China, particularly on the mainland,' a boy said solemnly.

‘Hong Kong too,' a girl on the other side of the room flashed back. It was the girl playing Katherine. ‘It happens in our world. We want to say, we can change this. We can use Shakespeare to change this.'

Another girl brought up the Occupy movement; they had friends who'd been in the protests that lasted from September to December in 2014, demanding greater electoral freedom from mainland China. The atmosphere on the island was jittery; no one was sure how things would go. ‘There is much to change in Hong Kong, many issues,' she said.

Politics aside, I wondered how they felt about Shakespeare: did he feel British, here in this former colonial outpost? They looked at me blankly. Most were native Cantonese; in 1997 they'd only just been born. The British era? Prehistory.

‘I think Shakespeare is a writer from everywhere,' someone said in careful English. ‘In Cantonese, he is a Cantonese writer.'

The girl who'd played Katherine spoke up again. ‘His words are very poetic in English, so for me it is quite hard to put myself into these words. For the British, I think it is hard to understand all the poetry. Maybe we here don't get all that poetry. But in Cantonese we can find something that relates to us now, in Hong Kong, in this society.'

I wanted to ask more, but they were eager for feedback. My turn – supper-singing time. Fourteen faces leaned anxiously towards me. I filled for a few minutes, blathering about Elizabethan marriage codes and property laws. What I really wanted to say was this: I thought they had entirely nailed the play.

Later that afternoon I sat in the sleek bar of a hotel above Government House, sipping green tea and soaking in the Hong Kong skyline. The
view across the cloudy green water to Kowloon was spectacular, framed by the gaunt grey exoskeleton of Norman Foster's HSBC headquarters and the angular glass fortress of I. M. Pei's Bank of China. At the feet of the skyscrapers and mansion blocks was dark, lush forest, carpeting the hills leading up to the Peak. No wonder the British felt such lordly self-confidence in Hong Kong, a confidence inherited by the multinational financiers who now controlled the island. Up here, it was easy to convince yourself you ruled Asia, if not the world.

I thought back to the image of Shakespeare I'd seen in that press conference in Taipei, with the Bard clambering over the globe like a plumper, goateed Godzilla. Did Shakespeare, too, rule the world? Is that what I'd really discovered on my travels?

Hunting through my notebooks, I searched for connections and linkages. I followed the thread back to the place where I'd started, twenty-three months earlier: at Shakespeare's Globe in London, watching a scratch company from Afghanistan perform a play little-regarded in the west,
The Comedy of Errors.
Powerfully moved by the experience, I'd spent that summer searching for Shakespeares that looked different from Britain's National Poet, digging among competing theses as to why he was now the world's writer.

Some of those theories had certainly borne fruit. No ignoring – particularly here in Hong Kong – the heavy tread of the British Empire, nor the way Brits carried Shakespeare across whichever waves they ruled, from Kolkata on the Bay of Bengal to the Cape on the south-west tip of Africa; to Canada and the American colonies right round through East Asia to Australia and New Zealand. In almost every territory that blushed imperial pink, Shakespeare put in an appearance, a reliable piece of colonial equipment, either performed on stage or part of the education system (and often both).

It was also true that the US-driven global spread of the English language had helped cement his reputation in those territories the British had never reached. Even if I had become increasingly dubious about the claim made by the Royal Shakespeare Company and the British Council that half the world's schoolchildren now study Shakespeare – despite the researchers' best efforts, the evidence was shaky – it was surely true that enormous quantities of people now encounter Shakespeare in some form or another, if not in formal education then via internationally successful television shows and movies such as Baz Luhrmann's
Romeo+Juliet
(1996), or in story form – novels, Japanese
manga Shakespeare (hugely popular across Asia), the Lambs'
Tales.
Even if only, say, a quarter of the world's population brushed past Shakespeare at some point, that was still nearly 2 billion people.

Perhaps most excitingly, a large proportion of these people must have little idea that what they are watching or reading
is
Shakespeare. With the recent explosion in Indian and Chinese cinema, particularly among the expanding Asian diaspora, the Shakespeares streaming across the globe are now more multifarious than ever.

This was something I genuinely hadn't computed before I left: what a minority sport English-language Shakespeare now is. In all but one of the countries on my route, English-language texts had far less effect on the dissemination of Shakespeare than translations into myriad local tongues, from Bengali to isiZulu. If an academic paper I'd heard in Delhi was correct, far more people now encounter Shakespeare in modern translation than in Early Modern English, rendering it an absorbing question as to who really ‘owns' Shakespeare's texts. Whoever it is, it certainly isn't the British.

I hadn't become any more reconciled to the word, but the concept of Shakespeare as a ‘rhizomatic' cultural figure – decentred, present in many places at once, his roots entwined with many different kinds of local histories – seemed more and more appealing. More, if one pushed the metaphor further, one could think of Shakespeare as a kind of living organism, continually evolving: much of the same genetic code was present, but mutated, so that the organism itself took ever more diverse and wondrous forms. The Cantonese students I'd been talking to earlier, equally influenced by traditional opera, old Hong Kong movies seen on YouTube and third-wave American gender theory, would surely recognise a Shakespeare who emerged from everywhere rather than a bald man with a ruff and
MADE IN BRITAIN
stamped upon his base.

How about another theory with which I'd set off – that Shakespeare's global significance was down to his benign universality, the fact that he was the same everywhere you went, an emblem of our common humanity? Though I'd lost count of the number of times people had told me there was something ‘universal' about Shakespeare, this hadn't been my experience at all. There were reflections and echoes, yes, but it was more accurate to describe him as a Rorschach blot that never looked the same twice. It didn't seem to me that interpretational fixedness or solidity was anything like the defining characteristic of the
texts I'd seen performed or read: it was the contrasts and competing inflections that were telling. In search of Shakespeare, I'd found him different at every turn.

Even where people had apparently tried to use Shakespeare as a bridge of shared humanity – Solomon Plaatje and his Setswana translations were a telling example – the reality turned out to be more ambiguous and complex. There was something about Shakespeare that made people want to
own
him, to claim him as one of them, to give cultural status and legitimacy to their ambitions or concerns, whether it was
‘unser
Shakespeare' and the cause of German nationalism in the nineteenth century or the agitated political situation in present-day Thailand. It seemed to me that no one could reasonably claim that any of these images of Shakespeare were alike. They were defiantly plural;
Shakespeares,
not Shakespeare.